Yes, I agree with the feelings of the original poster.
It’s simple: I should be able to right-click my profile photo at the top right menu, and select “invisible mode”, which will prevent collaborators from seeing my presence on the page. This causes both my avatar photo and my cursor movements to no longer being visible on the page.
While for others it’s not visible, for me now it’s greyed-out. When I hover it, a popover says “Invisible mode”. When I right-click it, the options appear just as they did before, now with the option to disable invisible mode.
I am super annoyed when PM/s, PO/s, Designers, Devs or whoever just click on observing me all day, and I can tell that they are. I find it very unproductive and a breach of privacy.
I find not being able to disable ‘observe’ mode a gross violation of privacy and am shocked I cannot turn it off. We shouldn’t have to need to request this feature. Come on Figma!
Totally agree, this can be a worth feature, as long as every team member is able to deactivate it, or allow it only to certain users/groups. It harms both privacy and creativity, and it might provoke also a false impression to some people (let’s name them clients or bosses) who do not know how design e.g. works in real life. When my cursor won’t move for an hour, someone might think I’m not working, so no reason to pay me. Anyway, maybe I’m photoshopping something, studying the styleguide, looking up consistency with existing brand-sites e.g. Or just watch my work with a different eye, to maintain some always welcomed self-criticism and objectivity…
Another solution could be to en/disable following individually on different pages of a project (I have usually my drat and layout boards, and the some “ready-for-production” boards. This would be anyway great in terms of user/group rights, but this is another topic I’ll suggest one day…
This is kinda ridiculous. Sorry, with Sketch you don’t have to worry about this. I love Sketch.
How cool would it be if there was a little button you could click, and that puts you in “privacy” mode and no one can see you? Is that so much to ask? They worked hard to make people see your every movement though.
This is a non-issue with Sketch, an amazing program. Just sayin! When I’m trying to work it feels so creepy on Figma.
It’s totally beyond me how this is not an optional feature and turned off by default. It’s a privacy issue (in Europe at least), it’s discomforting, it’s counter-productive and induces a work atmosphere based on surveillance and distrust.
I personally support this and I know at least two more freelance senior designers with 20 years+ in industry that think the same (this feature is highly counter-productive, and trust me, this is the backbone of this industry). Was again made aware of a colleague yesterday who got stalked by an agency owner at 10:00 pm on a weekend in preparation of a client presentation. This is a knock-out criteria for Figma if anyone might ask me on how critical I think it is.
Community manager’s reaction to user needs in regard to privacy issues and personal discomfort does imply that the ability to micromanage and control (i.e. digitally stalk) designers and co-workers is deemed a USP (“Please pretend you are not being watched” just does not do the trick and tells me that person does know near zero about the way the industry and the individuals within work; it’s a people’s business and this feature is highly discomforting).
With the complexity of multi level cascading design systems and the way price plans on team and enterprise level work it’s often enough just not possible to withdraw permissions, copy files over to other team or individual spaces and have it work the same way than before - it just doesn’t work like that. Beside the fact that there are technical limitations this would be a workaround for a missing feature that should have been there from the very beginning.
Ridiculous having paying customers beg for it over months and years… I just don’t get it. You are aware of the fact that we have also influence on what pipeline is implemented on corporate level, are you?
In my opinion, this could be very close to the “Privacy” or “Incognito” mode where everyone with the view access can only see the last saved version on a file. As designers, it would be understandable to have edit access and see real-time edits happening on the file.
This would be helpful to prevent micro-managing, as well as limiting the number of files a designer has to create for the same project (currently, we create two separate files. One is where designers make edits and the other is what we present to the clients for feedback/review)
this just keeps happening again and again to me. I can guarantee everyone here something… they’re probably working on adding MORE tracking, not taking this out… i repeat MORE tracking. they’re not taking this out ever. SWITCH TO SKETCH!!!
wouldnt in this case being able to share versions from the version history be the solution for this problem? While it cannot save you from colleagues “looking over your shoulder”, it can save you from clients and stakeholders doing the same thing.
This is definitely a needed feature. I want privacy while focusing on my work and being watched by people is a complete distraction. Designers should be able to turn on and off observe mode when it’s needed.
Quite a difficult topic… but I also agree that the current version makes it easy to disrupt a designers privacy. Duplicating the file to the draft is not always an option, especially if you need to work together with other people. Also it can lead to problems regarding versioning and makes documents prone to errors.
Figma really needs to balance collaboration between everyone in files and giving folks more privacy and reduce disruptions of focus.
Customizable (viewer) roles with manageable access options could be a solution.
Or at least being able to hide sections or pages to work privately (alone and with others).
